CIS-Hardened Debian 12 AMI with Packer and Ansible

As part of my infrastructure hardening and automation efforts, I built a CIS-hardened Debian 12 AMI using Packer and the ansible-lockdown/DEBIAN12-CIS Ansible role. For reference or reuse, Iโ€™ve made the AMI publicly available: AMI ID: ami-0ded45c1c47569084 Region: us-east-1 This post documents how I did it from scratch. ๐Ÿ› ๏ธ Tools Used Packer Ansible Ansible Lockdown Role AWS EC2 Debian 12 (Official AMI) ๐Ÿ“ Project Structure cis-debian-ami/ โ”œโ”€โ”€ packer.pkr.hcl โ”œโ”€โ”€ ansible/ โ”‚ โ”œโ”€โ”€ playbook.yml โ”‚ โ””โ”€โ”€ roles/ โ”‚ โ””โ”€โ”€ DEBIAN12-CIS/ # added via git submodule To add the Ansible role: ...

May 11, 2025 ยท 3 min ยท 504 words ยท Reza Behzadan, ChatGPT